Beckman, Janette

When someone asks Janette Beckman’s age, she answers with a smile and declares that she ‘is old enough to have created the cover photography of The Police’s first album, Outlandos d’Amour, released, in 1978’. In 1982, the British photographer attended her first hip-hop show, in London and promptly became enthralled by the musical movement and decided to settle in New York where she documented its flourishing debuts and its members, from Salt-N-Pepa to Run DMC. She who had begun her career at the dawn of punk rock had found in hip-hop another phenomenal expression of music and lifestyle nobody really believed in at the time. How wrong they were…